The Wisdom of Psychopaths (11 page)

Figure 2.7. The picture-word Stroop task (adapted from Rosinski, Golinkoff, and Kukish, 1975)

Their task, a favorite among cognitive psychologists, especially those interested in the mechanisms underlying attention, seems simple enough: name the picture while ignoring the incongruent word—against the clock, over a series of consecutive trials.

Most people, in fact, find this a tad tricky. The explicit instruction to name the focal image conflicts with the urge to read the discrepant
word, a grinding of the gears that leads to hesitation. This hesitation, or “Stroop interference,” as it’s known (after J. R. Stroop, the man who came up with the original paradigm in 1935), is a measure of attentional focus. The faster you are, the narrower your attentional spotlight. The slower you are, the wider the arc of the beam.

If Newman’s theory was to cut any ice and psychopaths really did suffer from the kind of information-processing deficit (or talent) that he was talking about, then it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what should happen. They should be faster at naming the pictures than the non-psychopaths. They should zone in exclusively on the particular task at hand.

The results of the study couldn’t have turned out better. Time and again, Newman found that while the non-psychopathic volunteers were completely undone by the discrepant picture-word pairings—taking longer to name the images—the psychopaths, in contrast, sailed through the task, pretty much oblivious to the jarring inconsistencies. What’s more—and this is where things start to get a little sticky for Scott Lilienfeld and the psychopathic spectrum—Newman has detected an anomaly in the data: an abrupt discontinuity in response patterns once a critical threshold is reached. Everyone performs about the same, encounters the same degree of difficulty with such tasks, on the lower slopes of the PCL-R. But as soon as you hit psychopathy’s clinical base camp, a score of 28 to 30, the dynamic dramatically changes. Indigenous populations at these rarer, higher altitudes suddenly find it easy. They just don’t seem to process the glaring peripheral cues that, to everyone else, appear obvious.

And it’s not that they’re immune to them. Far from it.
In a separate study, Newman and his colleagues presented psychopaths and non-psychopaths with a series of letter strings on a computer screen. Some of them were red. And some of them were green. And some of them were downright painful: volunteers were told that, following the random display of an arbitrary number of reds, they’d receive an electric shock. As expected, when their attention was cued away from the prospect of shock (i.e. when they were asked to state whether the letters appeared as upper- or lowercase), the psychopaths showed
considerably less anxiety than the non-psychopaths. But incredibly, when the prospect of shock was made salient (i.e. when volunteers were explicitly asked to state what colors the letters appeared in, red or green), the trend, as Newman and his coauthors predicted, reversed. This time it was actually the psychopaths who got more edgy.

“People think [psychopaths] are just callous and without fear,” he says. “But there is definitely something more going on. When emotions are their primary focus, we’ve seen that psychopathic individuals show a normal [emotional] response. But when focused on something else, they become insensitive to emotions entirely.”

With a disconnect in response sets showing up at precisely the point on the PCL-R that things start to get clinical, the mystery as to what, precisely, psychopathy really is—whether it lies on a continuum or is a completely separate disorder—suddenly deepens.

Is psychopathy just a matter of degree? Or are the big boys in a league of their own?

It’s reasonable to assume that the answer to such a question should, by its very nature, be black-and-white. That is, if psychopathy is on a continuum, then the trajectory from low to high, from Mother Teresa to John Wayne Gacy, must be linear, and the road to moral weightlessness smooth. And if not, not: you get the kind of precipitous increments in data patterns observed by Joe Newman. But actually, as anyone who has ever played the lottery will tell you, it’s not that simple. The six winning numbers are certainly on a continuum: a continuum of 1 through 6. But the size of your winnings, from $1,000 to a $1,000,000 jackpot, is a different story entirely. The function is exponential, and the relationship between the numbers on a continuum on the one hand, and how they convert (quite literally in this case) to “real life” currency on the other, is all about probabilities. The chances of snaring all six numbers (1 in 13,983,816) do not diverge
from the chances of snaring five (1 in 55,492) by the same degree that five diverges from four (1 in 1,033). Not by a long way. And so, whereas on one level things progress predictably, what they “boil down to,” in a parallel mathematical universe, doesn’t. What they map onto takes on a life of its own.

Back at the restaurant, I put my theory to Scott Lilienfeld: that actually both he and Joe Newman might be right. Psychopathy might well be on a spectrum. But at the sharp psychopathic business end of it, something ineffably stark seems to happen. A switch just seems to flip.

“I certainly think that’s one way of reconciling the two perspectives,” he reflects. “And it’s undoubtedly the case that those at the extreme end of many distributions seem to run on a different kind of gas from everyone else. But it also depends on your starting point: whether you view psychopathy predominantly as a personality predisposition or as an information-processing disorder. Whether you want to deal in cognitive deficits or variations in temperament. You can see it in the language, in the terminology used: disorder; deficit; predisposition; variation … It would be interesting to hear what Joe has to say. Have you put it to him?”

I hadn’t. But not long afterward, I did. “Is it possible,” I asked Newman, “that the further along the psychopathic spectrum one gets—assuming such a thing exists—the more you start, neurologically speaking, to see gradual changes occurring? Say, differences in the brain’s attentional mechanisms or reward systems, which, the more psychopathic an individual is, become increasingly laser-like in their focus, increasingly primed for immediate gratification? And that although performance on the PPI or PCL-R may be linear, the way that performance manifests itself in low-level brain activity, especially at very high scores, might instead be rather different? That it might, in fact, be spectacularly exponential?”

His eyes narrowed. The wily old gunslinger was in no mood for games. “Sure,” he said. “It’s possible. But the clinical cutoff [on the PCL-R] is 30. And that, in the lab, coincidentally or otherwise, is also
the point at which most of the empirical shit hits the low-level cognitive fan.”

He smiled and poured some coffee. “At any rate,” he said, “it doesn’t really matter which way up you hold it. A clinical psychopath is a pretty distinct specimen. Either way they’re different. Right?”

On March 13, 1841, the
William Brown
set sail from Liverpool, bound for Philadelphia. Five weeks into the voyage, on the night of April 19, the vessel struck an iceberg 250 miles off the coast of Newfoundland and began to sink rapidly. Over thirty passengers and crew, still dressed in their nightclothes, commandeered a longboat built to hold just seven. With a storm looming and icy Atlantic rain already beginning to fall, it soon became apparent, to First Mate Francis Rhodes, that the longboat would have to be lightened were anyone to survive. The same thought had occurred to the captain, George L. Harris, who had taken to an accompanying jolly boat along with a handful of others. But he prayed for deliverance from another, more palatable source.

“I know what you’ll have to do,” he confided to Rhodes. “Don’t speak of that now. Let it be a last resort.” The following morning he sailed for Nova Scotia, leaving the hapless, foundering longboat to its fate.

On the day of the twentieth, and on into the night, conditions worsened and the waves began to build. The boat sprang a leak and, despite frantic bailing, began to take on water. The situation was hopeless. And so at ten o’clock, on the night of April 20, a momentous decision was taken: some individuals would have to be put to the sword. Such an action, reasoned Rhodes, would not be unjust to those who went over the side, for they would surely have perished anyway. But if, on the other hand, he deigned to take no action, he would be responsible for the deaths of those whom he could have saved.

Unsurprisingly, not all of the assembly concurred with Rhodes’s conclusions. The dissenters contended that if no action was taken and everyone drowned as a result, then no one would be responsible for the deaths. In contrast, they argued, if he endeavored to save some of the party at the expense of even one other, he could only do so through the active taking of life, and would end his days, and quite possibly everyone else’s, as a murderer. That, by far, would constitute the greater evil.

Unmoved by the charge, Rhodes stuck to his guns. Since their only hope of survival depended upon staying afloat, not to mention, in addition, a Herculean feat of oarsmanship, the situation as it stood was untenable, he countered. Something, or someone, had to give. “Help me, God! Men, go to work!” Rhodes cried out to the deckhands as he and fellow crew member Alexander Holmes set about the grisly task of casting people off into the tumultuous, inky cauldron of the North Atlantic. At first the other seamen did nothing, prompting a second exhortation from Rhodes:

“Men! You must go to work or we shall all perish!”

The death tally started to rise. All fourteen of the male passengers were sacrificed, including two that were found to be hiding. Those who remained were just two married men and a boy, plus all but two
of the women: the sisters of a man who’d previously gone over the side, and who chose, voluntarily, to join him.

Eventually salvation beckoned and the survivors were rescued by a trawler bound for Le Havre. And when, at last, they arrived in Philadelphia, they filed a lawsuit with the district attorney. On April 13, 1842, almost a year to the day since he’d cheated the icy Atlantic, able seaman Alexander Holmes stood trial on a charge of murder. He was the only crew member they could find in Philadelphia—and was the only one to ever be indicted for his actions.

If you had been on the jury, how would you have viewed the case?

Before you answer, let me tell you why I’m asking. A couple of years ago, I presented this dilemma to a group of male undergraduates, half of whom scored high on the PPI and half of whom scored low. Each was given three minutes’ deliberation time in which to mull the problem over; then each student submitted his verdict, anonymously, in a sealed envelope. I wanted to know if the difference in PPI scores would have a bearing on what they decided. It didn’t take me long to find out.